The mofussil in the Indian subcontinent refers to the rural or semi-urban and provincial regions outside the major colonial presidency metropolises of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. As a spatial and subordinate administrative category, the mofussil was produced in the course of the nineteenth century. Since then, it has been a subject of popular representations, often seen as ‘feudal’ and ‘backward’. Bihar has been the centre of this discussion. David Boyk’s Provincial Metropolis examines the history of Patna and its transformation from a mofussil to a provincial metropolis during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Divided into five chapters, the book attempts to understand how Patna’s provinciality was intertwined with its urbanity when Bihar was part of Calcutta’s agricultural hinterland under colonial rule.

A walled city in Patna was established by Sher Shah Suri in the early sixteenth century and later adopted the name Azimabad under the governorship of Aurangzeb’s grandson, Azim al-Shan, in the early seventeenth century (p. 40). With the coming of the British a new racially segregated town, Bankipur, was established in the eighteenth century. During this period, the city experienced several changes in its neighbourhoods and social composition, resulting from nineteenth-century migration and the arrival of white-collar professionals. Amid these changes a lawyer in Patna, Khuda Bakhsh Khan, founded a public library in 1890. Boyk’s discussion of the history of the establishment of this renowned library is crucial for understanding the development of Patna’s urbanity. The library began as an ‘Oriental’ institution with the intention of collecting and preserving valuable manuscripts and books, and it became a ‘shrine of knowledge’ for the elite and the middle class (p. 99). It was the late nineteenth century that saw Patna’s public sphere transform with the birth of the Urdu newspaper Al-Punch, one of numerous Indian newspapers modelled on Punch, the renowned London comic weekly. Al-Punch was founded ‘in response to a challenge to Biharis’ urbanity and linguistic authority’ (p.120). According to Boyk, the paper served as a platform for efforts to establish a ‘provincial public’ by forging connections between readers and writers. Its ultimate project was to defend the Biharis.

Patna emerged as the epicentre of transformation in middle-class subjectivity and political expression, in which the city’s English-medium schools and colleges played a pivotal role. The parts of the new city of Bankipur and the area near Khuda Bakhsh library became a hub for elite Biharis dissatisfied with their perceived subordination to Bengal (p. 155). The Partition of Bengal Presidency in 1905 served as a pivotal moment for defining Bihari identity and contemplating the nature of backwardness and the progress of their city and region. People such as Mahesh Narayan and Sachchidanand Sinha expressed their support for the separation of Bihar from Bengal. Other Bihari politicians, mostly Kayasthas and Sharif Muslims, along with other journalists, supported this view of separation. Several students’ organizations also supported the nascent Bihar movement. Without rejecting the British Empire, they ‘reproduced the nationalist logic that a people required its own polity in order to fulfill its destiny’ (p. 184). They also emphasized Bihar’s unity in terms of language, ethnicity and history. On 12 December 1911, at the imperial durbar, King George V announced the creation of Bihar and Orissa, a separate province with the capital at Patna. This separation reshaped Patna’s prominence and its public life. Patna seemed to have emerged as a modern metropolis, prepared to lead Bihar into progress and modernity (p. 213). The city required a physical transformation. J. F. Munning, a New Zealander, was appointed to design and supervise the construction of the new capital. However, compared to its monumental contemporary, New Delhi, the new capital was modest in both scale and style.

The decade following the separation brought new people, new money and new institutions. But several promises remained unfulfilled. The Patna City Municipality remained a weak, underfunded institution, leading to unhygienic conditions in the city. Wealth disparities increased significantly. By the 1920s and 1930s, Patna City (the old city) had lost its status as the centre of prestige and authority. The most significant blow was to the Islamicate traditions that had long played a crucial role in the city’s cultural and intellectual life. After the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, many of Patna’s remaining traces of public culture were erased as Muslims fled to Pakistan, while those who stayed were further marginalized.

In places, the book might have benefitted from a greater engagement with other kinds of historical sources. However, the history of mofussil remains a relatively underexplored field of scholarship. This work is an original and timely contribution to this field of urban history and is essential reading for understanding the history of Bihar and Patna.